Interesting: Tesla Electric is an app that Tesla Powerwall customers can use sell the battery power stored back into the inadequate Texas power grid. Some customers are making as much as $150/day doing this (e.g. charge your Powerwall in the early morning hours of low demand, then sell it back during the afternoon/evening peak usage.)
{{ Some Tesla Powerwalls on the Tesla Electric program reported making as much as $150 a day selling electricity back into the grid. Jonathon Blackburn shared a screenshot from a Tesla Electric customer on LinkedIn showing that they were selling electricity for over $5 per kWh: }}
Here in WA State where we use science and arithmetic to inform public policy and have a municipally-owned electric utility, weâre paying 11 cents per kWh.
Thatâs exactly how it should work. It is helping shift the demand from low times to high times. If you own a battery that can do it, you can use that battery to earn a profit. I understand that $150 a day is a very rare occurrence, most of the time it is much less than that. Itâs like in some parts of Europe last week, for about 75 minutes, electricity had a high negative price. I saw a few people post that they âearnedâ 25 euro by charging their car at that time.
I got the Long Range. I did NOT spring for FSD because it wasnât worth $12k (now $15k). But I did pay for a month of it via subscription ($200+tax/mo) just recently to try it out. It is really quite good, astoundingly good even, but it isnât âfullâ and it isnât âself drivingâ, it is a really good assist. I drove over 2000 miles on FSD and it is really quite impressive. But again, it isnât âfullâ and wonât be for some time. I made at least 200 voice reports to Tesla about errors and deficiencies, and even if they fix all the ones I told them about, it still wonât be âfullâ. I suspect it wonât be until the next generation of hardware, or maybe until the one after that, that it can approach âfullâ capability.
Why Long Range? Well, we do a long trip periodically (couple times a year) and I did not want to take the minivan (our only remaining non-EV vehicle) for all those trips, and I also wanted a decent range between stops. I would stop anyway, when I was younger Iâd do 10 hours straight, but now that Iâm older, I prefer to stop every 2-3 hours to stretch, pee, drink, eat, etc, so stopping to charge is perfect for that. And as far as performance goes, the LR is quicker than 99% of the cars on the road today, I donât need the performance model to up that number to 99.2% , and I donât do track runs or drag racing or street racing, so whatâs the point?
Regarding charging, over my 20,600 miles, Iâve gotten efficiency of 271 Wh/mi. At 14c/kWh, thatâs 3.8 c/mi. But some of my electricity is free. I charge when we go to the supermarket, I sometimes charge at the movie theater, I charged at TopGolf in Atlanta a few weeks ago, and at two malls in the Atlanta area, and even at the hotel we stayed at overnight on the long trip. Of course balancing the low-cost/free charging options, fast charging along the highway costs a lot more than 14c/kWh, more like 35c/kWh, but that is only used on long trips when there is no choice. Maintenance? Filled the wiper fluid once, rotated the tires 3 times, will change the cabin air filter next week if it cools down one evening. Thatâs it.
Thank you Mark for that detailed review. The Long Range model sounds best to me as well, though I like the higher seat height on the Model Y. When Iâm 80, I may not be as interested in stooping down to get into a sports sedan. Always planning ahead.
Even electric utilities understand it and thatâs why they are buying Tesla Megapacks as fast as Tesla can make them. While Tesla EV sales are growing at only 50%, Tesla storage is growing at over 100%.
The Captain
Itâs the Batteries, Stuoopid! Interestingly batteries are making fossil fuels âcleanerâ because less is needed. Anyone ever hear of âComplex Systems?â Maybe the most important science is âMaterials Scienceâ learning to do what nature already does.
There is a market for that. In my opinion to a larger extent it can be self governing. Of course fraudulent behavior would get punishedâŚeventuallyâŚ
You could get a model Y Long Range! We test drove both the model 3 and the model Y, me, my wife, and two of the kids. I was leaning Y, and they all convinced me to get the 3 instead. The 3 has two small advantages, it has somewhat longer range and it is sportier to drive. The Y, of course, has the advantage that it is larger, you sit higher, and it can carry more stuff.
After recent shoulder surgery, my left arm was in a sling for 6 weeks, followed by limited use of it for a few months. It was somewhat difficult to get into the car during that time. And it was easier to get into the passenger seat, so I had one of the kids drive me around whenever possible.
Not necessarily. Usually a home battery storage system also has an associated solar energy system attached to it. In most of these cases, the customer was able to charge up their batteries in the morning before large solar generation kicks in, and then they were able to sell it to the utility in the afternoon because their solar was providing what they needed (to run their A/C, etc), so itâs a double benefit. At peak times of usage, they can not only supply their own electricity, but they can also sell some to the utility to help âsmooth the peakâ without having to build extra large-scale dispatchable energy generation systems to handle the rare peaks.
That said, the power grid should, and will, have some storage capability to help themselves over some of the peaks. Thatâs because sometimes the peaks will be so high that even with customers feeding back electricity, it may still not be enough.
I understand what your saying. My BIL in CA has solar. While he does not have a battery, he does âsellâ his excess generated power back to the grid for a credit.
The original post mentioned that folks were storing electricity from the grid during low usage times and selling it back during high usage times.
No new power was being generated as it is with solar. Essentially they were storing electricity from the grid for $150 a day.
Eventually weâll get every EV vehicleâs battery connected go the grid when theyâre parked at home, and let folks sell energy back to the grid that way. Most people are driving less than 40 miles/day while carrying around a 200-300 mile battery â lots of spare capacity out there.
Yes, no new power was generated (above and beyond what would have been generated anyway). The âserviceâ provided by the person is time shifting of power. But the point is that the main reason they have those batteries in the first place is because they use them to store solar energy in the afternoon and then use it at night or the next morning. In this case, they were able to use their batteries for essentially one additional cycle, to store some grid energy and then return it to the grid when it was needed.
Statement #1: I wonât buy an EV because I have range anxiety. Not enough battery storage to make my travel a sure thing.
Statement #2: I have so much excess storage I can sell it back to the grid, even though that leaves me with very little range after the utility pulls it from me.
I would only do this if they make it worth my while, not only in terms of paying for the storage of the energy, but also paying for the âwear and tearâ (additional charging cycles) of my batteries.
The profit motive is an inherent human instinct. It can easily override certain other anxieties among many people.
The fact is, that people usually know when they need to use their vehicles, so they can adjust their charging habits (and thus also selling stored electricity habits) to fit those needs. Furthermore, once youâve owned a decent EV for a month or two, range anxiety dissipates almost completely.
I thought Elon said Tesla batteries were likely good for 1 Million miles â especially if youâre only charging and draining them in the 20%-80% capacity range.
They are likely to be good. But the nature of battery chemistry is that their capacity slowly drops. For Tesla batteries, they usually drop 10% over the first year or two. And then thereafter drop a few percent each year, some less, some more, depending on lots of things (discharge/recharge cycles, temperature, charge curve, etc).
So while you may start (as I did) with 82 kWh capacity, it declines over the years.
, and I donât do track runs or drag racing or street racing, so whatâs the point?